SMX Live: Breaking The Speed Limit: Faster Sites Win!

2:28:58 PM Barry Schwartz: Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Q&A Moderator: Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance (@keyrelevance)
Speakers:
Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (@jcolman)
Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants (@Jehochman)
Tim Mayer, Vice President, Marketing, ShopAtHome.com (@timmayer)

2:32:33 PM Barry Schwartz: Starting in a min

2:33:07 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:36:06 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:36:26 PM Barry Schwartz: Jonathon Colman, Internet Marketing Manager, REI (@jcolman) is up first

2:36:43 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:39:19 PM Barry Schwartz: Site Speed is your Silver Bullet

2:40:03 PM Barry Schwartz: Note: To get to the silver bullet, we had to talk about werewolves, love, feelings and body building. Long story.

2:40:17 PM Barry Schwartz: Site performance, is the one thing that makes everything better. Conversion to rankings

2:40:51 PM Barry Schwartz: Google uses speed as an organic search ranking factor for the top 1% of competitive queries (is that true?)

2:41:16 PM Barry Schwartz: Um, I think he confused it, see http://searchengineland.com/google-1-of-searches-affected-by-site-speed-ranking-factors-97570

2:41:35 PM Barry Schwartz: 40% of customers will abandon any site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

2:42:05 PM Barry Schwartz: The average fortune 500 company has a site that takes 7 seconds to load

2:42:17 PM Barry Schwartz: For every one second of load time, conversion drops by 7%

2:42:33 PM Barry Schwartz: For every 1 second of load time, user satisfaction drops by 16%

2:42:58 PM Barry Schwartz: A faster site reduces the cost of infrastructure and releases by 50% or more

2:43:52 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:44:05 PM Barry Schwartz: This goes back to the werewolves thing

2:44:34 PM Barry Schwartz: 5 Key Steps for optimizing performance:

2:45:03 PM Barry Schwartz: (1) Learn: Google and Yahoo have great resources on this

2:45:31 PM Barry Schwartz: Also stevesounders.com wrote the book on this

2:45:50 PM Barry Schwartz: Firebug, webpagetest, google analytics, google page speed, yahoo yslow are free tools

2:46:29 PM Barry Schwartz: (1) Do caching

2:47:20 PM Barry Schwartz: (2) Don't dupleicate JavaScript, remove unused CSS

2:48:21 PM Barry Schwartz: Use < link > your css and avoid @import

2:48:46 PM Barry Schwartz: (3) ...

2:48:52 PM Barry Schwartz: (4) Avoid redirects

2:49:09 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:50:32 PM Barry Schwartz: (5) CSS sprites to reduce HTTP requests (it is one big image, with individual images within the big image

2:51:52 PM Barry Schwartz: Best Practices when doing sprites:
- Images load together
- Images have similar color palettes
- Images are PNGS or GIFS
- Images are both small and cachable

2:52:12 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:52:45 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:52:51 PM Barry Schwartz: It was a 60 frame animated all as a CSS sprite

2:52:58 PM Barry Schwartz: Results:

2:53:13 PM Barry Schwartz: 50% decrease in amount of time for Google to crawl a single page

2:53:27 PM Barry Schwartz: 100% increase in amount of crawling done by GoogleBot

2:53:46 PM Barry Schwartz: 1.5 seconds saved per page view per customer (saving customers 22 years of time)

2:54:01 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:54:18 PM Barry Schwartz: Site performance is not just about SEO it is about customer UX

2:57:08 PM Barry Schwartz: Next up Tim Mayer, Vice President, Marketing, ShopAtHome.com (@timmayer)

2:57:22 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:57:40 PM Barry Schwartz:

2:58:02 PM Barry Schwartz: Some of the site speed they have done was perceived speed improvements... Kinda like "tricks" he said.

2:58:33 PM Barry Schwartz: Back when he was at Yahoo and other search engines they looked at the value of each link, load time, how much it cost, ROI, etc

2:59:17 PM Barry Schwartz: What tools do you need to measure?

2:59:33 PM Barry Schwartz: (1) A/B Testing tool like Optimizely

3:01:13 PM Barry Schwartz: (2) Page Speed Tools

3:01:32 PM Barry Schwartz: (3) Eye Tracking, User Attention, Clicks & Scroll tools

3:01:47 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:01:50 PM Barry Schwartz: CrazyEgg

3:02:09 PM Barry Schwartz: (1) Be agressive with the first test to gauge the level of potential lift

3:03:39 PM Barry Schwartz: (2) Assign each link (including social buttons) a real or synthetic value to compare buckets

3:04:28 PM Barry Schwartz: How fast should your site be? Some people say it should be 2 seconds, some people compare it to competition, some people do the try your best or use site performance graders and go by their scores¿

3:04:41 PM Barry Schwartz: Tim said, take this test

3:04:56 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:05:15 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:05:38 PM Barry Schwartz: This is an under used metric but they used in search often... Throw back the header first to make the user feel it is fast

3:06:04 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:06:36 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:07:18 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:07:52 PM Barry Schwartz: Case Study: ShopAtHome.com

3:08:08 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:08:49 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:09:01 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:09:27 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:10:28 PM Barry Schwartz: Next up Jonathan Hochman, Founder and President, Hochman Consultants (@Jehochman)

3:11:09 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:12:10 PM Barry Schwartz: His test is when he goes into a restaurant he asks for a glass of water and if he doesnt get it fast enough, he leaves - cause it will just be downhill from there

3:12:29 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:14:13 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:16:08 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:16:23 PM Barry Schwartz: Wow, that is fast for Dallas location

3:17:32 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:18:15 PM Barry Schwartz: He used CloudFlare CDN to speed up his site, that is the before and after

3:18:28 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:18:56 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:19:14 PM Barry Schwartz: Complain to your host and it might get faster

3:19:29 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:19:45 PM Barry Schwartz: Size of your code doesn't matter if it loads faster

3:20:03 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:20:09 PM Barry Schwartz: 6 times more code but loads slower

3:20:41 PM Barry Schwartz: CMS & Caching:
- It takes time to run server side scripts, cache the pages on the server
- Caching cuts response times
-

3:21:40 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:22:15 PM Barry Schwartz: Web Video and Speed:
- Async video impacts page load speed very little
- Streaming large video files from the same server not a good idea
- Wistia is a good option he said

3:22:53 PM Barry Schwartz:

3:23:29 PM Barry Schwartz: Easy Speed Wins:
- Good Hosting
- Using CDN
- Simplify design
- Cache Plugins for CMS
- Appropriate Use of Async Content

3:25:25 PM Barry Schwartz: Q&A and then You&A With Matt Cutts in about 30 minutes from now...